Experiential Learning Takes Education To New Levels

The way education used to work, the focus was on the instructor. He or she was the source of all the information you needed, sharing expertise through lectures and directing you to appropriate textbooks. That's changed. Today's education is evolving to be more "experiential." The instructor's role is still pivotal, but it's different. Now students learn in ways that are practical and hands-on, in a simulated setting or out in the real world, and the instructor is a guide, helping them identify lessons they can apply to future experiences.

This shift is happening across many educational institutions, including The Chang School, because its effects are so positive. One of the key benefits is that experiential learning can help transform your career. I asked four experts, each of whom will be sharing many more insights at ChangSchoolTalks 2016 on February 17, to explain how. Here's what they said.

It will help you keep up with employer expectations

McKinsey has an incredible statistic: between September 2009 and June 2012 -- fewer than three years -- the number of skill sets needed in the workforce increased from 178 to 924. The upshot? We'll need more flexible and relevant lifelong learning mechanisms to help us move forward, retool, and advance our careers. More college or graduate school won't be the answer. Rather, we'll continue to see a burgeoning of vibrant and alternative learning pathways, such as coding bootcamps, that will help students apply and translate their knowledge into learning to do in the workforce.

Experiential learning gives prospective career changers the ability to experiment, fail, and learn from real-world "pain points," but in a supportive environment. By rolling up their sleeves, candidates can flex their muscles in directions they would not normally feel comfortable in, but have the opportunity to substantially contribute to solving problems and innovating new ways of thinking. Experiential learning gives candidates the confidence to excel in the new economy.

A linear, predictable career would call for linear, predictable studies. In this day and age, careers are everything but predictable. They are challenging, pushing us to explore problems and find solutions outside our area of expertise. They call for our ability to constantly reinvent ourselves, to be incredibly resilient, humble, and fierce. We can't hit pause. Learning has to follow the pace: it has to be agile, timely, and collaborative. Many answers to our questions can't be found in the pages of dusty theories: they live in the minds and hearts of people around us, people who succeeded or messed up before us, so we can build on their ground. The question I ask is, how could you transform your career without experiential learning?

The biggest paradigm shift in entrepreneurship education is the idea of agile, lean start-up methods. It's all about discovery of a scalable business model (trying new things while not wasting resources -- i.e., being "lean") rather than planning and executing on a validated model. The simple fact is that discovering a good business model is all about trial and error. Entrepreneurs need to continuously improve their offering, test the market, learn, adapt, pivot, and try again. Experiential learning is absolutely central to these revolutionary new ideas. It's about explicitly identifying your hypotheses and creating experiments to learn what customers really want and how to best satisfy those needs and monetize the value created.

Sneak in a lesson about gravity while creating beautiful art with pendulum painting. Suspend a broomstick in between two chairs and hang a plastic cup with some string in between. Put some paint in the cup, then poke a hole in the bottom. Set the cup to swinging to get some lovely designs. (Then you can talk about why the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth, gradually creating smaller and smaller circles.)
Get the details: Hand Made Kids Art

You may know the recipe for homemade slime, but have you ever made magnetic slime? This incredibly cool experiment involves a bit of parental help and supervision, but it's well worth it!
Get the details: Frugal Fun For Boys

Whip up a little kitchen chemistry to teach your kids about colour changes and chemical reactions. Red cabbage juice turns blue when mixed with a base (baking soda) and red when combined with an acid (vinegar). Combine both to get bubbles!
Get the details: One Time Through

The maker movement has done a lot to get people of all ages interested in DIY technology. The MaKey MaKey kit helps kids take everyday objects and turn them into keyboards! Think playing piano with a banana or playing a videogame with Play-Doh. For a demonstration of what a MaKey MaKey kit can do, check this out.
Get the details: MaKey MaKey

This one's called "$7 and a Screwdriver," because Leah at Socks & Shoes Not Required spent $7 on an old VCR at a thrift store. She explained to her kids how it worked, then gave them a screwdriver and let them go to town. Older kids could even try to put it back together. Brilliant!
Get the details: Socks & Shoes Not Required

Wanna check out something cool? This neat experiment involves piping drops of water (carefully) onto coins. Your kids will be amazed that the water doesn't spill over the side! It's a lesson in surface tension, and your child can measure the amount of drops each type of coin can handle until it overflows.
Get the details: The Science Kiddo

LEGO and STEM go hand-in-hand, and you can use your child's favourite multi-coloured building toys to teach many science, math and engineering concepts. Here, you can tackle density with some oil, water and a brick. (More ideas on the site below.)
Get the details: Science Sparks

Anyone with a child and a smartphone knows that kids love taking photos. Send your school age children on a scavenger hunt to photograph items in nature, like flowers, seeds, birds, insects or tree bark. Great for an outdoor birthday party!
Get the details: Betsy's Photography

If you glue popsicles together in a particular way, they will pop apart when you drop them. This lesson in tension is a fun one, and you can even set up the "bombs" next to each other for a chain reaction (a la the domino effect).
Get the details: Frugal Fun For Boys

Forget boring old regular Bingo. Teach your child about fractions in a fun way with this Fractions Bingo game. She rolls the dice to figure out what fraction she's looking for, then fills it in once she finds it. First to get five in a row wins!
Get the details: School Time Snippets

Kids don't learn about simple machines until grade school, but you can introduce the important concept of levers at an early age with this fun and colourful project. Your child can investigate which lever sends the cube flying the furthest.
Get the details: Munchkins & Moms

Your child will learn about kinetics, the study of forces acting on mechanisms, while creating some little funny pals to play with. Turning the wooden dowel makes the googly heads spin, as you can see here.
Get the details: Left Brain Craft Brain

Get your preschooler interested in number recognition and counting by utilizing the landscape of Dr. Seuss favourite, The Lorax. Older kids can work on adding and subtraction.
Get the details: Inspiration Laboratories

If you REALLY want to bring the outdoors in, why not grow mushrooms with your children? This mom of quadruplets taught her four little ones a new x-word by growing xylophagous fungi on a log in their house (in this case shiitake and oyster mushrooms). The kids cared for the mushrooms by misting them each day until finally, mom made them into a casserole.
Get the details: Capri + 3

Ever heard of ichnology? It's the study of the traces of organismal behaviour, like burrows or footprints. Introduce your child to this fascinating study with some air dry clay and plastic animal figurines. Check the website for more ideas involving paint (to make animal footprints on paper).
Get the details: Suzy Homeschooler

A simple mixture of oil, water and food colouring creates a colourful light show in a jar. It also teaches kids about density. (ICYDK, the food colouring is denser than the oil, so it sinks through the oil layer and starts to dissolve in the water).
Get the details: I Can Teach My Child

Even preschoolers can get in on the action with this cute apple-picking counting game. Kids pick up "mini-apples" with child tweezers and place enough on each corresponding number.
Get the details: Fun-a-day!

Magna Tiles are awesome building toys. But you can also get kids excited about multiplication with these colourful, versatile squares. Here, this child is demonstrating 10 x 2.
Get the details: And Next Comes L

Your little ones probably love to look at the sky at night. Bring that magic into the daytime by letting them try their hand at creating each of the planets. A great introduction to astronomy for even the youngest kids!
Get the details: A Little Pinch of Perfect

Set out containers of varying sizes and shapes, then have your scientists-in-training guess whether they think a full scoop of coloured rice will fit inside or overflow. You can explore volume with liquids as well.
Get the details: Little Bins For Little Hands

Explore "pirate science" by freezing small bits of treasure in a baking soda, Jell-O and water solution. Your kids can "dig" for treasure by using vinegar to excavate the goods.
Get the details: Fun-A-Day!